Monday, July 14, 2008

The APS Introduces "Physics"

The American Physical Society (APS) is introducing a new publication today, simply called "Physics".

Anyone who has recently glanced at a library shelf of physics journals or browsed the literature online will instantly recognize both the increase in volume and the fragmentation of disciplines. How can a researcher stay on top of his or her own field, much less stay abreast of related areas that might harbor interdisciplinary gems? One way is to seek the counsel of experts, and so we begin a new publication, simply called Physics. Our goal is to highlight exceptional papers within the body of excellent research that the American Physical Society publishes each year in all of the Physical Review journals....Why Physics? We feel that it fills an important niche in the Physical Review ecosystem. At the core we have the exceptional research published by the Physical Review journals and Physical Review Letters, some 18,000 peer-reviewed papers last year. To bring this work to wider notice, every week the American Physical Society alerts journalists to these exciting research papers, to stimulate coverage in print and electronic news media. And broadening the audience further, the online website Physical Review Focus highlights research papers each week in short articles written by professional science writers. Physics now satisfies the need for comment and context written by independent scientific experts, for physicists and those in related fields.

I guess this is like the APS Focus, but covering a wider subject range and a lot more of the papers that have appeared in their publications. This certainly isn't a bad idea, considering that Nature and Science do this routinely for many of the articles that appear in their journals.